Howard Andrew Jones's Blog, page 17

The Skull is Pleased

Wow, well that’s pretty cool. The magazine Kickstarter made it’s initial funding goal in less than half a day, which is fabulous. Thanks to all who joined in.

Now I hope you’ll help me spread the word. I’m certain that there are more than the 200 something people who’ve currently pledged who like sword-and-sorcery and who would be thrilled to get a magazine like this into their hands. I honestly believe there are thousands of people who would dig what we’re doing here, and I’d like to find them and sign them up so that this magazine will be a viable and ongoing concern.

If you’re aware of message boards where like-minded sword-and-sorcery fans hang out, can you drop them a line and point them towards the Kickstarter? If there’s a Cimmerian mead hall nearby, can you swing in and tell them about our mad dreams?

Make Your Pledge!

The skull has risen with the full moon! At long last the Kickstarter for the new sword-and-sorcery magazine has launched!

Visit here to pledge your shekels, and ready yourself for adventure!

Monday Morning Madness

Lots of stuff is happening behind the scenes even if the site itself seems a little abandoned. The Kickstarter for Tales From the Magician’s Skull is nearly ready to launch — there will be an announcement in the next several days. Just this morning I was looking over a proposed membership card for the Legion of Skulls, the fan club for the mag.

Work continues on the novel revision. I’m getting closer all the time. I also saw the near final cover and I love it — I hope to share it with you soon.

And I’ve been reading something a little outside my wheelhouse and enjoying the heck out of it. That’s Mary Robinette Kowal’s Ghost Talkers, which posits a reality where mediums were real, and in World War I were used to communicate with dead soldiers to gather intelligence. That, at least, is where the story starts, and it quickly develops into a compelling mystery that’s well-plotted and surprising. I’m about two thirds through and I’m still not sure who’s behind it all. Additionally, as always with Mary Robinette Kowal’s work, there’s intelligence and kindness threaded through her prose, with none of the self-indulgences I see in too much modern fantasy. As any of my frequent visitors know, I’m tired of unrelieved darkness and naval gazing and destined greatness. It’s a pleasure to read of believable characters determined to do the right thing. 

Return of the Sword-and-Sorcery Kickstarter

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m mentioning it again because there are only 26 hours left as I type this, and the Guilds & Glaives Kickstarter is about 2 grand short of its goal. The anthology is going to feature a whole slew of sword-and-sorcery fiction, including a new tale from yours truly, so I have all kinds of reasons for wanting to see it hit its goal.

Add in that if the Kickstarter funds, it will have a few slots open for submission as well, and that might be even more incentive. If you’ve been on the fence, or been meaning to join in but forgot about it, I hope you’ll take a look and think seriously about pledging.

 

Monday Heroic Fiction

Work continues behind-the-scenes with Tales From the Magician’s Skull as Joseph finalizes the Kickstarter preparations. I can hardly wait to point the way, but you’ll have to wait just a couple more weeks. There are many things about working with Joseph that I like, and one of them is his careful preparation.

I haven’t been reading nearly as much the last month, as my wife and I discovered Parks & Rec, and have been watching it in the evenings. We don’t usually binge watch television like this, but it’s nice to have a positive show about people you like. It kind of feels like the 2nd-5th seasons were the best, but we’re watching to the end. In the shortened 7th season I’m finding myself laughing out loud several times an episode again, even if some of the main plot lines feel a little forced and sometimes indulgent.

But that’s not heroic fiction. I wanted to share something that was, and that’s the Blades books by Kelly McCullough. I’m most of the way through one of them, Bared Blade, and it reads something like Zelazny and Chandler co-writing a fantasy detective story in ancient China. Except that by “detective” I mean that there’s a problem to be solved and a sort of professional trouble-shooter who’s a former assassin for the goddess of justice. That means that, unlike so many other blokes in cloaks, he was only offing the bad guys. Aral is a force for good, or at least strives to be, the fantasy equivalent of Chandler’s knight in the battered trench coat working his weary way through a corrupt but beautiful city.

I made several new friends at GenCon this year, one of them being Kelly, and when I got home I sat down with a pile of books from friends old and new that I had encountered there. Owing to the Parks and Rec viewing, Kelly’s is the only one I’ve gotten very far with. I’ll have details about any others I like in coming months.

Bill Ward and I have started making notes about the Corum books. I’ve been holding things up a little, because if I’m not writing or working on the Kickstarter or providing the daughter with essay writing advice as she’s applying to college, I’m a little low energy. Anyway, at some point we’ll announce we’re almost ready to have another read through.

Lastly, I’ve another recommendation. Ages ago, before I started serious work on finalizing Tales From the Magician’s Skull, I read issue 11 of Grimdark magazine for Black Gate. I’m WAY overdue getting up a review, but I ended up with two thumbs way up. I like grimdark fantasy but don’t seek it out preferentially. It has a lot of the same tone I like from sword-and-sorcery but I find that when everyone’s in gray and everything is covered in crap and smells I don’t enjoy spending as much time there. I was afraid Grimdark magazine would be like that, and it isn’t. There was a nice variety of stories and plenty of sense of wonder in amongst that sense of horror. I’ll finally finish a long review and discuss it at Black Gate, but my thumbnail is two thumbs up. There’s a talented editor aboard there and I’m going to subscribe. If you’re not familiar with it, you should take a look.

Farm Life

One evening this spring while I was finishing up some yard work I spotted a fox slinking through our pasture. If you don’t keep chickens you might not know that foxes love chickens. When we first got started raising chickens we lost a number to clever foxes, who are in on the secret that chickens are delicious. Our birds are free range, but we keep a dog in part to protect the chickens, and we keep the birds inside a coop in the barn except when it’s full daylight.

As it happened, though, dusk was on the way and I hadn’t yet done anything with the chickens because I’d been trying to finish some work on the fence. The dog was inside because she hadn’t been keeping far enough away from the mower. My wife ran to get the dog and I sprinted to find the chickens, only to discover that our rooster was already rounding them up and herding them into the barn.

Roosters really only have one job, and that’s to watch over the chickens. Most roosters don’t manage even that. They just stand around crowing, constantly, and just as constantly mating with the hens. Big Red, though, actually took pride in his job. In my experience there’s not a whole lot of personality difference between chickens, and I haven’t really formed many attachments with them. Big Red was far and away my favorite. You can’t help but respect someone who’s good at their job, even if he’s a chicken. I saw him herd the chickens several times when stray dogs wandered onto our property.

In addition to being a good watch bird, he was also gentle when my kids wanted to pick him up, and wasn’t stupidly aggressive against humans or the barn cats, another thing you can’t take for granted. He was also a lovely bird.

You notice I’m writing in the past tense, and that’s because something, a fox we think, finally got him. It happened one day while the dog wasn’t outside. A fox must have nabbed him, because there was nothing left but some feathers. (A loose dog wouldn’t have carried off the body — they’d just have killed and gnawed a little and left.) But the chickens had made it safely back to their roosts. I can only assume that he fought off the attack in a brave last stand so his flock could get to safety, for I know darned well that the fox wouldn’t have targeted the largest bird.

Here’s to Big Red, a brave rooster who took pride in his job. We all liked him so well that we allowed one of the hens to brood over a clutch of eggs to see if we can get another from his bloodline with similar characteristics. Five hatched late last week.

 

Writing Tests

Jake Parker “A Fireside Story”

A while back I talked about one of the questions I ask myself to make sure I’m on the right track, and that’s the Doctor McCoy test. 

Sometimes I think about another one, though, and that’s the “Grandparent at the Fireside” test. The idea is that the grandparent is at the fireside telling a story. As he or she is telling the story, there will be questions from young listeners. Sometimes, of course, young listeners have an agenda or want to take over the story, so for the sake of the test I pretend that the questions are coming from an intelligent listener. 

So as I’m thinking about myself being that grand parent, I question whether there would be legitimate questions about the clarity. “Which fellow was that again, Grandpa?” or “What did the tomb look like?” or “How big was that monster?”

If I think about a tale in that way I tend to anticipate the crucial elements just a little better so that my readers don’t have unanswered questions about what’s going on or what it looks like.

Linking to Brackett

Matthew, this is a Gorn. Note opposable thumbs.

Hocking pointed me towards something of a celebration of Leigh Brackett the other day on a site titled Glorious Trash. Seems like it’s a pretty cool site to poke around at, too. Joe Kennedy sat down to read both versions of “The Secret of Sinharat,” which is something I always meant to do, and then compared them in an essay, which is something I always meant to do. And he loved them, which is something I’ve always done.

Even if you haven’t fallen in love with the work of Leigh Brackett, you can get a sense of what a great writer she was if you swing by for a visit. And poke around a while there, because there’s other cool stuff to be found as well.

I’ve talked about Brackett a few times here on this site, of course —

Here, with Bill Ward when we looked at “The Moon that Vanished.”

And earlier this year, where Bill Ward and Fletcher Vandenburgh and I all joined forces to write about “The Last Days of Shandakor.

Now I’ve got to go work on my novel and get some more work done on Tales From The Magician’s Skull!

Catching Up

Behind the scenes work on the first issue of Tales From the Magician’s Skull continues, and continues to please me. I can hardly wait for the Kickstarter to launch, but there are a few pieces still sliding into place. I’ll keep you posted.

Work continues on the book, and I’ve seen the initial draft of the cover, and boy am I mightily pleased. It’s so good I will one day change my site header.

Bill Ward and I are finally starting work on our Corum re-read, so if any of you regular visitors want to get in on the read with us, I hope you’ve found your copies of Michael Moorcock’s first Corum trilogy. As busy as things are here I’m still not sure when we’ll start that read through, but it will be soon.

Also, watch out for sleestaks. Lately they’ve been sighted on the edge of my property. Sometimes they send spam offering to write articles for my site that will link back to theirs, but who wants to be involved with that, right? In the end they’ll just want my pylon crystals, or maybe they want to devour human flesh. I was never entirely clear on that.

And now, I must away. Those words aren’t going to write or edit themselves.

Revisiting Universe R

Many moons ago, back when I blogged as BG_Editor (that’s Black Gate editor), I took a little trip to Universe R. I talked about that trip in an article I wrote for Steven Silver, but I’ve never mentioned it on this blog, and I thought it time.

When it comes to the parallel universes we visit in speculative fiction, some of my personal favorites are the ones where Rome never fell, the one where Spock has a goatee, and Universe R.

I imagine a lot of you have thought about it. It’s that place where great artistic works were never lost. It’s the land where overlooked, forgotten, or under appreciated poets, playwrights, authors, and artists were encouraged and celebrated and lived on to craft more work. I don’t mean the egoverse where you’re the top of the charts or have written a chain of bestsellers – this universe is for the artists you wish had gotten a better deal. Universe R can’t be completely logical, of course. For instance, I’ve been lamenting the destruction of the Library of Alexandria since I first learned of it – and especially after I saw Carl Sagan walking through it in Cosmos – but if the Library of Alexandria had survived, we’d probably be further along with a lot of developments and some of the later artists who prospered in Universe R might not ever have been born. You can’t worry about Universe R making that kind of logical sense or the whole thing falls apart.

I dropped by my counterpart’s home in Universe R to look around his shelves: The work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides came to us complete in Universe R, rather than just a few plays from each, and the works of Menander and Sappho reached us whole, rather than as just a few tantalizing fragments. Jumping ahead a bit, Chaucer finished The Canterbury Tales, though he had to live to 90 to pull it off, and it takes up a huge chunk of a shelf. There’s no confusion over Shakespeare folios and I see one fine copy of his Cardenio and other tantalizing things lost to history. On the music rack, Bach’s work was better preserved so that some of his music wasn’t lost because it was sold as fish wrappers. Mozart lived to a ripe old age, cranking out more and more astonishing and varied works.

On my fiction shelf in Parallel Universe R I can find all the great historical swashbuckling novels Harold Lamb wrote when he almost gave up fiction in the 1930s, just as his prose was at its peak. Near it is a complete run of all of Robert E. Howard’s fiction. He went back to writing fantasy a few times after the 1930s, but he turned to big bold historicals when they hit big in the 50s, and wrote many westerns, teaming up with Hollywood producers to create some western film masterpieces. His Blu-rays are over there on the other shelf, next to the run of the original Star Trek.

Here in Universe R the dogs of Star Trek’s second season never got made and the show didn’t get thrown to the wolves in the third season – thanks to the diligent work of the story editors and producers, the final three years of the show built upon the promise of early episodes. When a sequel series finally came out, Captain Sulu was also a resounding success. And as long as we’re on the subject of science fiction, my complete run of the stories from the incomparable Leigh Brackett is much longer in Universe R. Five stories of Eric John Stark, and three short books? There was an entire set of them, not to mention the TV show.

In Universe R The Beatles realized that they were greater together than the sum of their individual parts, and regrouped every few years to make amazing music, even while experimenting with their side projects. And Badfinger… poor Badfinger simply picked a manager who didn’t steal all of their money so that they went on to record far more music.

At least two biographies were drafted by people who worked with and knew Hannibal of Carthage. One of them was his campaign physician. You can see evidence of them being used as source material in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans when his Romans meet Hannibal. The moment when Hannibal comes upon the body of Marcellus sounds very much like something witnessed in person rather than a vague retelling, and is oddly moving. In Universe R, I can pull both books by those biographers down from my shelf any time I want.

This is an easy game to play, probably because any of us who love music, art, or literature have favorite creators we wish the world had heard a little more from. And let it be said that Universe R doesn’t have to hold the works solely of these familiar sorts of creators; when I posted on this subject years ago, it proved to be one of the most popular topics the Black Gate blog had generated, and was even taken up by other bloggers. One poster remarked that they’d wished Évariste Galois had gotten so wrapped up in his mathematical calculations that he forgot to head off for a duel and get himself killed. Never having excelled much at math, I hadn’t heard of Galois, but I promptly looked him up.

There are many fine suggestions from others who dropped by to participate in that original post, and I encourage you to go take a look at the comments section. For those of you who don’t want to make the jump, here are some ideas added by James Enge:

I’d like some of the lost Greek epics, too, like the Nostoi, about the returns of the heroes from the Trojan war. A complete volume of Sappho’s works would also be great. Likewise the lost books of Livy, Tacitus, Petronius, and Seneca. And some more old English epics along the lines of Beowulf. Other lost epics: Ariosto’s sequel to Orlando Furioso and Milton’s Epic about King Arthur.

In more recent stuff: I’d certainly have all the volumes Kuttner should-have-written about Prince Raynor, books 6-10 of Zelazny’s Amber series (Not the ones he actually wrote, though), a Hammett novel where the Continental Op crosses paths with Sam Spade (and who knows, maybe Nick & Nora Charles). William Hope Hodgson’s later work, after he escaped death in WWI, would certainly (have) be(en) worth a read; likewise the postwar novels of Saki. But I think my most prized possession would be a complete run of Unknown, 1939-present. Without it, who knows what would have happened to heroic fantasy in the mid-20th century? Would Pratt have written his sequels to Well of the Unicorn without it? Or would C.S. Lewis have tragically failed to complete Ten Years After? Hard to say.

Music-wise, I’d certainly be listening to the later symphonies of Tchaikovsky, the music Schoenberg would have written if he hadn’t become involved in that atonal junk, the albums Billie Holliday cut in old age with her voice more broken and beautiful than ever. Favorites would include the mature work of Bix Beiderbecke and Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix and many another artist who laid his life and his talent down as offerings at the brazen feet of some stupid addiction.

I’m pretty sure my Blu-rays would include the lost film of I, Claudius starring Charles Laughton, the Star Wars movies filmed from Leigh Brackett’s scripts, John Boorman’s Lord of the Rings movies, Witchblade seasons 1-6 (but not the season 2 that actually happened), more Firefly and Star Trek. I think, in my version of Universe R, Gene Roddenberry left ST to produce Genesis II and Gene Coon came back to produce the final four seasons of Star Trek.

I imagine a lot of us have played Universe R scenarios out in our own head, but when we share across genres and disciplines and explain the reasons and stories behind our choices, we start broadening our own perspectives. Not only do we find others with similar passions, we learn about sad and interesting, even fascinating works and their creators that we’re inspired to seek more information about. Lofty principals? Maybe not, but asking people what they’d like to see in Universe R certainly entertains us, if nothing else.

I want to close out with something John Chris Hocking added. He signed it “weeping uncontrollably” and while that was an exaggeration, I think all of us mourn for what might have been. Especially when it might have been THIS cool:

An Iconic Frank Frazetta painting of Conan.

Willis O’Brien, fresh from his success on King Kong, dives into and completes War Eagles. The film, which climaxes with warriors from a lost world flying on giant birds of prey battling a giant Zeppelin over New York, is such a smash that O’Brien becomes a superstar.

Armed with new-found fame and fortune, O’Brien and his youthful protégé Ray Harryhausen begin work on a series of films based on the works of Robert E. Howard. The Conan films, the most elaborate and beautiful fantasy films ever made, bring Howard an unexpected windfall. This wealth grants the Texas author unanticipated freedom and allows him to hire top specialists to care for his ailing mother, and, later, his pen-pal H. P. Lovecraft. Howard introduces Lovecraft to O’Brien, and by 1940 O’Brien and Harryhausen have defied both Hollywood and convention by filming a spectacular version of HPL’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” The movie is so overwhelming in its lushly bizarre and grotesque imagery that it is quickly banned.

Today, in Universe R, I have the completely restored Blu-ray of this film.

What about you folks? What’s on your shelves in Universe R?